In New York, I'm playing in a church, solo, doing instrumental stuff. There's talk of doing more, like, installation-type things with some of the specimen horns I've played through. Just filling a room in a museum with these horn-speaker sculptures and then making loops that run all day, and you walk around the room and sort of mix the sound by where you stand. That's all way in the future, but that kind of stuff is a different way of thinking about performing.

Norman is a very up-close, personal, character drama and I'd like to do something more zoomed out, a little more pastoral, some sweeping epic. I'd like to try something different.

I don't get particularly precious about things like this, though. Like the record company said, "We need a radio edit that delivers the hook" - I don't even know what they consider the hook in that song ["Oh No"] - "that delivers the hook sooner." So I'm like, "Okay. I see that." And they were all walking on eggshells, like is this going to be sacrilegious to me or something, to mess with this art I've created? And I'm like, "Great. I get to tinker with it, I get to mess with my song some more."

This might be a controversial thing to suggest, but in a quest to understand and relate to terrorism or school shootings, sometimes it feels like it's real, the appeal. As we've seen with ISIS, it's not always the devout who are getting into it; it's just people looking for a sense of belonging. The more they feel they're up against, the more intensity the cause has. It's an epic clash of cultures, and both sides are playing that up, but it's human beings disaffected, detached, and lonely.

Sometimes the word dictated the melody.

Most records, you build from the drums and bass up. This one, we started with the vocals in Nashville and recorded them live with just the guitars and tried to make that complete and lovely-sounding without any adornment at all. I really wanted to get something with the vocal that I've never gotten before Armchair Apocrypha.

I finished touring the last record and I started recording new .I never really left the bubble, which is I think a good thing. I was just very focused. Maybe I should have taken a break or something, and not done such a long push.